Attorney General Jeff Sessions blasted Chicago and its local leaders Wednesday, tying “local policies on undocumented immigrants to soaring crime rates and threatening to withhold federal police grants if the city does not change” according to an August 16 Washington Post report.
In Miami, Sessions said in a speech that “respect for the rule of law has broken down,” in Chicago and he linked the increase in crime there last year to the city’s “so-called sanctuary policies,” WAPO said.
First of all, on a per capita basis, Chicago does not even place among the top ten U.S. murder capitals according to FBI data.
Yet Sessions reiterated;
“Every year, too many Americans’ lives are victimized as a result of sanctuary city policies, whether it be theft, robbery, drugs, assault, battery and even murder.”
Truth be told, ‘more lives are victimized’ because of a cocktail of reasons—circumstances that Sessions’ clearly small-minded thinking and social myopia will not allow him to comprehend. Chief among them are being born into abject poverty and hopelessness, entire neighborhoods where the breakdown of community support systems are cruel and basic economic lifelines are absent. America is filled with unfair places where educational inequity thrives — sections of the nation where the basic ladders of opportunity are limited or harder to utilize — unlike more prosperous parts of this country where the ‘well to do’ segregate themselves apart from the rest, places where life is just easier.
Leaders like Sessions use tragic statistics from Chicago and other cities to further what looks like a racist and self-serving agenda. In theory, Sanctuary cities are places of hope, tolerance and the American Dream. If Jeff Sessions and his DOJ truly cared about cutting crime in America, they would be pouring truckloads of money and resources into these city police departments, not cutting it. Instead, he shows his hypocrisy and selfishness by engaging in a draconian, mean spirtied and narrow minded misinformation crusade such as the one he is on now. What he endorses is dangerous, it’s morally wrong.
P.S. FBI ranking for 2016 (highest to lowest) ― St. Louis, Detroit, Birmingham (as in Alabama, Sessions and my beloved home state), Memphis and Milwaukee.
None of these towns are bastions of “illegal immigration.”
